Wednesday, 16 January 2008

If you could choose an adult education programme to come to at Hampton Court, what would be your subject of choice? What do you want to know?

This is a partially hypothetical exercise, so no limitations on how wacky or far out the ideas can be......except NO practical cookery courses as that's an assumed 'given' in the pantheon of wished for courses already!

Half day, full day, evening lectures, a combination of all or any, linked thematic series of talks, hands on sessions, practical, pure theory.....whatever you could possibly think of on any topic linked to Hampton Court, so art, history, clothes and costume, conservation, etc. etc. etc.

A couple of ideas to get you started:Researching recipes.....how do you go about finding historic recipes to try? How do you read them? How can you source the ingredients?

Historic photography techniques.....lots of pictures have been taken of Hampton Court over time, how do the processes differ? What can we learn from these methods? Could we try to replicate them?

either of those could have a practical element to them or simply be lectures and discussions. That's the sort of thing I'm after.

Any and all comments welcome if you'd be so kind, no promises that any ideas could be turned into reality, but you never know!

I asked some American friends what they'd like to see. They responded:I'd love to see some Festival dishes, perhaps ones that were donefor special events like Coronations, etc. It might also be interesting to see the service of a meal. I've read descriptions about who ate where at Hampton Court, but there's not so much about how the actual service was done...I'd love to see something like that.

The subject that would fascinate me would be who did what, when and where in the kitchen and what the pecking order was. For example who decided to serve chicken, who killed, cleaned, seasoned and cooked that chicken and who took it to the table. I doubt it was all done by the same person but I didn't know how duties were divided.

Further to Elise' comments,what happened before the produce arrived at the palace?Who was in charge of deciding the menus,did the king have any input,what were his favourite meals?who was in charge of ordering the goods and making the payments,how difficult would sourcing the produce have been in comparison to today?no.1 fan

Or how the ordering (of foods) itself was conducted and to echo another comment, what about who deciding what was going to be served. and beyond the cooking and the service... the proper conduct of eating.